Welcome to the Git manpages translation project

This project is not about translating Git itself. Unfortunately, Git does not use Weblate and relies on direct use of po files and Git. If you are up to the task, please refer to the specific instructions.

Helpful Tips

Anyway, Git is a version control system (VCS in short) and this kind of software expects users to understand some dedicated concepts. More generally, translating a tool requires at least a minimum of knowledge of its purpose and use. Git is no exception, and its manpages are full of its specifics.

Here are a few helpful advices in order to help you work through this translation.

Know a little more about Git

As said earlier, knowing the base of Git is necessary in order to prevent mistranslations. Even if you are not going to be an expert at Git (you could, given the content of the manpages), you can try to install it and make a basic use of it. To get you started, please refer to the introductory chapters of the Progit book, at least the first three chapters.

Set up a glossary of the key concepts

When translating a software where some words have been chosen to hold some key concepts, it is often necessary to maintain a list of the selected translation of these words, that convey the concept correctly and are used in every place the original word is used.

Git provides a glossary with definitions and Weblate has a glossary feature where a reminder is shown when a glossary term appears in the original string. This is an excellent way to enhance the quality of the translation, while helping translators share the same vocabulary.

Translate placeholders in command lines

When some template command lines contain <terms-in-brackets>, it is helpful for the reader that these terms are translated in their language and used repeatedly (use the glossary for that).

Translate in order

If you don't specify an order on Weblate, the source segments are presented in the order priority, which places in first the content of most used git commands. The corresponding manpages are more susceptible to be read by beginners. So your work has the biggest impact right when starting.

Get in touch the maintainer

In case you need to contact the maintainer for e.g. an issue in a source string or an issue with the translated manpages, the project is hosted on GitHub where issues can be opened.

Dear fellow Git translator,

I skipped the v2.45 release, sorry for that.

Now, a new release of Git is coming soon, v2.46.0. The strings are frozen, and the release candidate 0 has been tagged. It's time to update your translations.

In addition to upstream updates, this new release brings a lot a changes which are partly due to the work on the source documentation that I brought in v2.45. Namely:

• Starting to standardize the markup for placeholders and constant strings. The work was done in order to better uniformize the look of the man pages and update them to the style applied for other applications.

  • verbatim strings, i.e. strings that are constant and must not be translated are marked up as verbatim with backticks (or double + signs when they are stuck with other letters): `clone.filterSubmodules` , ++--filter=++1
  • placeholders are emphasized with underscores :_<pathspec>_. They are meant to be variable names, and translated.

• The formatting has already been applied to git-init and git-clone. So that makes a lot of small markup changes. More updated pages are coming.

• As some of may have noticed, I added a script in order to mark as keywords the verbatim string in Weblate. This way, the formatting errors are caught up early. There are still some edge cases that create false positive. Please let me know when you meet some.

  The update window will close on Sun, 28 Jul 2024.

  If you have any questions, please get in touch with me.

  Thanks,

  Jean-Noël Avila